American Post-Modernism Flashcards
(74 cards)
Truman Capote
Am PoMo
Born in New Orleans, moved to New York, dropped out of school and started writing for The New Yorker. Known for living the highlife, but did so supposedly in an effort to “research” his novels.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote
in which Holly Golightly, a young woman, comes to New York seeking for happiness. He has a nameless cat and a brother named Fred. The nameless narrator is an aspiring writer who has the same birthday as Capote (September 30) and who follows Holly’s life, filled with colorful characters. “What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there…” The novel is constructed as a memory of events, that happened about 15 years earlier. Holly has left the country before the end of the war, and the narrator has not seen her since.
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
a pioneering work of documentary novel or “nonfiction novel”. The work started from an article in The New York Times about the murder of a wealthy family in Holcomb, Kansas. Sponsored by the magazine Capote interviewed with Harper Lee local people to recreate the lives of both the murderers and their victims. The research and writing took six years to finish.
J.D. Salinger
Am PoMo
After he wrote Catcher in the Rye, Salinger presumably got sick of being lionized and went into seclusion.
Franny and Zooey
J.D. Salinger
Am PoMo
This book, along with much of Salinger’s 1960s fiction, tells the story of the Glass family. Glass, that’s a name to remember. concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger’s short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the “Jesus prayer” as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the “Jesus prayer” is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails.
Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
Am PoMo
Tells the story of Holden Caulfeild, who is a young man that gets in trouble at his elite college. The story chronicles Holden’s going berserk and hating most people and most things about society. In the end, it turns out that Holden has a brain tumor—“a tumor on the brain,” he says—which presumably explains his berserk behavior. Somehow someone has begun pimping Holden as an archetypal figure in American literature—like James Finnimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo in his Leather Stockings Tales. Title is allusion to Robert Burns.
Saul Bellows
Am Pomo
Jewish author
The Adventures of Augie March
Herzog
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
Am PoMo
The rich picaresque novel recounts the seemingly unconnected experiences of its hero in his quest for self-understanding. Augie March, the protagonist, is born into an immigrant Jewish family in Chicago before the Depression. His mother is poor and nearly blind. George, his younger brother, is retarded, and his elder brother, Simon, wants to become rich as soon as possible. Each of them is ‘drafted untimely into hardships’. Augie proceeds through a variety of dubious jobs and adventures. His employers include the real estate dealer named Einhorn and Mrs. Renling, owner of a smart men’s store, and other colorful, energetic characters, obsessed with sex, making money or both. Augie loves women and observes each portion of the female anatomy closely. On his mystical quest to discover ‘the lesson and theory of power,’ Augie finds everywhere lies, and asks why he always have to fall among theoreticians. The novel is a hymn to city life, it avoids sentimentality, and ends in Augie’s healthy laugh.
Herzog
Saul Bellow
Am PoMo
centers on a middle-aged Jewish intellectual, Moses E. Herzog, whose life had some to a standstill. He is on the brink of suicide, he writes long letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, ex-wife Madeleine, Adlai Stevenson, and God. As Augie March, Moses Herzog is introspective and troubled, but he finally also finds that he has much reasons to content with his life. After pouring all Herzog’s thoughts into letters Bellow notes in the last words of the book: “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”
Christopher Isherwood
Am PoMo
Associated with WWII and Berlin. Friend of Auden, who appears by other names in his fiction.
Berlin Stories
Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood
main character Sally Bowles
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
Southern writer. Tell tale last names to look for: Snopes, Compson, and Satorise, and Sutpen. Particularly “Quentin Compson.” Most pieces are set in a fictionalized La Fayette County, Yoknapatawpha County. Makes long sentences. He went by “Count No ‘count.”
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
The Compson farm is in decline. The novel is set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss., in the early 20th century. It describes the decay and fall of the aristocratic Compson family, and, implicitly, of an entire social order, from four different points of view. The first three sections are presented from the perspectives of the three Compson sons: Benjy, an “idiot”; Quentin, a suicidal Harvard freshman; and Jason, the eldest. Each section is focused primarily on a sister who has married and left home. The fourth section comments on the other three as the Compsons’ black servants, whose chief virtue is their endurance, reveal the family’s moral decline.
Absalom, Absalom
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
Mysterious Thomas Sutpen builds an estate, imports black slaves, fights with them. concentrated on Thomas Sutpen’s attempts to found a Southern dynasty in the 19th-century Mississippi. “You see, I had design in mind. I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally, of course, a wife. I set out to acquire these things, asking no favor of any man.”
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
The book consists of interior monologues, most of them spoken by members of the Bundren family. Faulkner follows the illness, death, and burial of Addie Bundren. Her dying wish is to be buried in her home town. The family struggles through flood and fire to carry her coffin to the graveyard in Jefferson, Mississippi. The journey becomes Addie’s curse. “Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.” Cash, Addie’s son, breaks his leg, Darl, another son, attempts to cremate his mother’s body by setting fire to the barn, and Dewey Dell is raped in the cellar of a pharmacy. Addie is buried next to her father in the family plot. Darl’s sanity dies with her mother and he is taken finally to an asylum. Anse, the father, appears with a woman, introducing her as the new ‘Mrs Bundren’.
Light in August
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
Light in August is the story of Lena Grove’s search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
Go Down Moses
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
Series of short stories, contains “The Bear,” one of his most celebrated short works.
“A Rose for Emily”
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
“The Bear”
William Faulkner
Am PoMo
Richard Wright
Am PoMo
He busted open the market for black fiction. He was involved in the Communist Party, and mentored Ralph Ellison in both authorial persuits and socioeconomic issues.
Black Boy
Richard Wright
Am PoMo
A black boy named Richard, living in Mississippi, endures a violent home life and excels in school, becoming his highschool’s Valedictorian. He gives his own speech, rather than one to appease the white audience. He moves to Chicago and works some jobs that exploit poor blacks. When the Great Depression hits, he joins the Communist Party but eventually loses their trust because of his controversial writing. He leaves the party and believes his writing is the way to connect to the world. This is autobiographical.
Native Son
Richard Wright
Am PoMo
Story of black Bigger Thomas, who works for the white Daltons. The daughter, Mary Dalton, and her communist boyfriend, Jan, break taboos of black white interaction. Bigger accidentally smothers Mary and burns her in the family furnace to cover up the manslaughter. He frames Jan, but Mary’s bones are found in the furnace and Bigger is sentenced to death.
Uncle Tom’s Children
Richard Wright
Am PoMo
An allusion to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story ‘Fire and Cloud’ was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938.
James Baldwin
Am PoMo
He was a gay black man. He’s known for rejecting both white and black mainstream society—saying “a pox on both your houses”—and writing the “truth” as he saw it. He moved from America to France, presumably to get away from these folks.
